Remembering 9 women behind the civil rights era’s biggest achievements
These women may be lesser known to most Americans, but they are my heroes and
I walk gratefully in their footsteps.
Americans may know the names of Rosa Parks or Coretta Scott King, but the numerous other women who played key roles in the fight for equal rights are too often wiped from the history books.
“There’s a Chinese saying, ‘Women hold up half the world,”‘ the late civil rights historian and NAACP chair Julian Bond told NBC News in 2005. “In the case of the civil rights movement it’s probably three-quarters of the world.”
Here are just nine of other women who made indelible contributions to the civil rights era:
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- Septima Poinsette Clark
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- Pauli Murray
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- Daisy Bates
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- Diane Nash
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- Jo Ann Robinson
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- Amelia Boynton Robinson
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- Ella Baker
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- Dorothy Height
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- Fannie Lou Hamer
Continued on MLK Day: Meet 9 lesser known women behind the civil rights era’s biggest achievements
Sen. Lindsey Graham: Republicans ‘not generating enough angry white guys’
Can you spot the black republicans?
Some are not bothering to pretend the GOP isn’t the party of white men.Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is warning Republicans that the strategy of relying on “angry white guys” is eventually going to doom his party.
This week, the Republican Party, which is reportedly 92 percent white, has struggled to find minority speakers to take the stage at their convention. While former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, former Democratic Rep. Arthur Davis and Utah congressional candidate Mia Love all performed well, they were speaking to a crowd of overwhelmingly white faces. In fact, only 2 percent of Republican delegates are black.
Graham told the The Washington Post that it’s just a matter of time before changing demographics catch up with his party.
“The demographics race we’re losing badly [sic],” the senior senator from South Carolina explained. “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
via Sen. Lindsey Graham: Republicans ‘not generating enough angry white guys’ | The Raw Story.
Justice for Voters in Texas and Florida – NYTimes.com
Republicans in Texas and Florida have been in the vanguard of the pernicious, widespread efforts to suppress voting by Hispanics and blacks. Fortunately, federal courts are seeing these efforts for what they are: a variation on the racist laws that disenfranchised millions before those tactics were outlawed by the Voting Rights Act.
A three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday unanimously rejected Texas’s voter ID law, which required court approval to take effect. The court described the law, known as SB 14, as “the most stringent in the country.”
Read more: Justice for Voters in Texas and Florida – NYTimes.com.
BBC News – Nut-throwers ejected from Republican National Convention
Two attendees were ejected from Republican National Convention on Tuesday for throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawoman. The individuals told her “this is how we feed animals” as they threw the nuts, multiple witness said. In a statement, convention officials said the attendees had “exhibited deplorable behaviour”.
I wonder what Mia Love and Condi Rice have to say about this?
BBC News – Nut-throwers ejected from Republican National Convention.
Romney’s Embraces Birtherism
“No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that I was born and raised.”
With that comment to a crowd in Michigan, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney officially embraced the “birther” movement and touched off a firestorm of protest across the airwaves and internet.
Of course, those protesting didn’t include his live audience or the extremists on the right. Nor, given Romney’s embrace of Donald Trump, should we be surprised by this joke-that’s-not-a-joke. Ari Melber of The Nation put it succinctly: “Jokes can be more revealing than talking points.”
GOP Attorneys General: Voting Rights Act Should Be Struck Down To Boost Laws Suppressing Minority Vote | ThinkProgress
The Republican attorneys general of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. Significantly, the brief points to the fact that the Voting Rights Act impedes laws intended to make it more difficult for racial minorities to cast a ballot as a reason why Court should cast a skeptical gaze on the landmark voting rights law responsible for breaking the back of Jim Crow:
Condoleeza Rice Named First Black Female Masters Golf Club Member
Country clubs are still a bastion of white male power. Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky who favors banning parts of the historic 1960’s Civil Rights legislation, celebrated of his electoral win at the private, all white Bowling Green Country Club. Although I am not a fan of most of Condoleeza’s policies, since she has left public office she has made some cogent commentary on racism She is also pro-choice, so right-wing nut jobs who say she should have been Vice President are just lip service to cover their psychotic Obama Derangement Syndrome. Congratulations to Ms. and her role as a reluctant pioneer. I hope she doesn’t get mistaken for the help too many times!
Condoleezza Rice, the first female African-American Secretary of State, made more history on Aug. 20 as she was named as one of the first two women members of the Masters Golf Club at Augusta National in Augusta, Ga.
According to the Associated Press, Rice, a 57-year-old Stanford University political science professor and former Secretary of State of the United States of America, and South Carolina financier Darla Moore, once considered the richest woman in the banking industry, were both named simultaneously as the Masters Golf Club’s newest members, breaking the club’s 80-year history of female discrimination.
Black Women Humiliated during NYC Police Stop & Frisk
Shari Archibald’s black handbag sat at her feet on the sidewalk in front of her Bronx home on a recent summer night. The two male officers crouched over her leather bag and rooted around inside, elbow-deep. he pulled out a tray of foil-covered pills, Ms. Archibald recalled.“What’s this?” the officer said, examining the pill packaging stamped “drospirenone/ethinylestradiol.”
“Birth control,” Ms. Archibald replied. Crystal Pope said she and some female friends had been patted down by officers who said they were searching for a male rapist.
The laws governing street stops are blind to gender. Male officers are permitted to frisk a woman if they reasonably suspect that she may be armed with a dangerous weapon that could be used to harm them. A frisk can escalate into a field search if officers feel a suspicious bulge while patting down the woman’s outer layer of clothing or the outline of her purse.
Last year, New York City police officers stopped 46,784 women, frisking nearly 16,000. Guns were found in 59 cases, according to an analysis of police statistics.
ABWW Heroine of the Day: Sadie T. M. Alexander
Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander was a lawyer and civil rights advocate for 50 years who achieved a number of academic and professional firsts as a black woman. On June 15, 1921, she became the second black woman in the United States to receive a Ph.D.; the first, Georgiana Simpson, got the degree a day earlier at the University of Chicago. Mrs. Alexander was also the first black woman in the nation to get a Ph.D. in economics and the first to receive a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1927, she became the first black woman to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School; her father had been the first black man to graduate from the school. And she became the first black woman to pass the Pennsylvania bar. In 1928 Mossell Alexander was the first African-American woman appointed as Assistant City Solicitor for the City of Philadelphia, serving to 1930; she was reappointed from 1934 to 1938. She was also active in numerous professional and civic organizations. From 1943-1947 she was the first woman to serve as secretary of the National Bar Association.
Before receiving her doctorate in economics, Mrs. Alexander had been the first national president of the black women’s sorority, Delta Sigma Theta.Mrs. Alexander practiced law with her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, a Harvard Law School graduate, until he became a judge in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. In the 1940’s, she was assistant city solicitor in Philadelphia. Two decades later she headed the city’s Commission on Human Rights. Mossell Alexander worked in her husband’s law firm from 1927 until 1959, when he was appointed to the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. She practiced law on her own until 1976, when she joined the firm of Atkinson, Myers, and Archie as a general counsel. She retired in 1982. She passed away in 1989.
An elementary school in West Philadelphia, the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School (“Penn Alexander”), is named after her. The public school was developed in partnership with the University, which supports the school financially and academically. The Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania is named in her honor.
ABWW Hater of the Day: Nikki Haley
Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. People in nations freed from colonialism long for the days of “civilized rule,” LGBT Republicans like GOProud who support candidate who see them as demon spawn, black republicans who cannot give speech without referring to how lazy, immoral and dysfunctional African Americans are can be seen as suffering from a political Stockholm Syndrome.
Women represent 51% of the population but only hold 16.8%, of the 535 seats in the 112th. Congress. Stockholm Syndrome politician, Nimrata “Nikki” Randhawa Haley of South Carolina is one of only six female Governors in the United States. The Governor who is the daughter of immigrants supports a law that requires all immigrants to carry documentation at all times proving that they are legally in the United States. The law is currently the subject of a lawsuit initiated by the United States Justice Department on numerous grounds, including claims the immigration law violates the Supremacy Clause. She also supports flying the Confederate battle flag on the grounds of the S.C. State House. How does a woman stand by the war flag of a set of treasonous states who would ban the immigration of her Indian Sihk parents? State Senator Jake Knotts, a South Carolina lawmaker and supporter of Haley opponent Andre Bauer, repeatedly referred to Haley as a “raghead” because of her Sikh background. Haley responded with a mild rebuke instead of taking this racist to task for his vicious commentary.
As an immigrant and a black woman, I find her stances deeply insulting, but her policy on women’s issues makes me want form a feminist drop squadfor her ass.
Haley once refered to a reporter of the Charleston Post and Courier as a “little girl” for criticizing her lavish spending on a trip to Europe. She is staunchly anti-choice and as a state Representative, Haley voted was against The Exempting Cases of Rape from Abortion Waiting Period bill would have allowed specific cases of women to not have to wait the mandatory 24 hours before having an abortion. The Governor who made headlines when she claimed that “women don’t care about contraception”
, vetoed a bill that would have allowed free HPV vaccinations for girls. Haley, the mother of a teenage daughter denied protection against the HPV virus which is a leading cause of cervical cancer (which 4,000 women die from in the U.S. per year) to thousands of young women. But the wicked witch of the South was not finished. She joins Voldemort’s uglier, stupider cousin Gov. Rick Scott of Florida by vetoing a bill that provides almost half a million dollars for domestic violence and sexual assault prevention. The Governor defended her anti-woman stance by saying that rape and sexual assault prevention programs “distract from” the Department of Health’s mission and sexual assault victims are “only a small portion” of South Carolinians who need help. She failed to mention that South Carolina ranks seventh in the number of women killed by men. I guess the good lady is aiming for number 1. American exceptionalism, indeed!
Angry Black Woman Watch 